Link building is one of those things, that almost everyone is doing – but no one likes to talk about. In the old days, lawyers used to create hundreds and thousands of links. Often, they would be all low quality, with no value. What’s changed is that now Google prefers high quality links only – and will penalize you if you’re engaging in spammy link building.
It’s beyond a shadow of a doubt -Â in order to rank in competitive industries – you need links. These links can’t come from old school tactics – because come time for a penguin algorithm update, you’ll just disappear.
What’s in demand today, is innovative strategies that satisfy the high quality requirements from search engines – yet simultaneously result in higher rankings.
In this blog post, i’m going to reveal to you one of the strategies being used by the top 1% of lawyers doing SEO – and ranking.
Without a doubt, as long as I can remember, SEO experts have considered .edu backlinks as the holy grail of link building. They come second to .gov links. Numerous case studies, black hat + white hat, have been done discussing the value of .edu backlinks. Often, many of the spammy .edu links come from abandoned blogs, or worse – hacked university pages. They were “fly by night,” links – not designed to be forever — and only to get a temporary increase in rankings.
At Zogby – we’re not going to rattle off and disclose whose doing it. We don’t want to “out” lawyers who are using this tactic. There’s nothing wrong with using this tactic, in our opinion – this blog post is an observation of a strategy being employed.
Many law firms have been creating scholarships.
Here’s an example of what that scholarship might look like. This is a page on the website of a lawyer who ranks well in Texas.
After creating this scholarship, lawyers(or their SEO companies) – then reach out to all the different universities and their financial aid departments, mentioning their scholarship. Often what happens is that universities will post a link to the law firm’s Scholarship page.
That one scholarship page can be submitted to hundreds of universities, resulting in potentially hundreds of college backlinks. Often we’ve seen scholarships be in the range of $500— often law firm’s only offer 1 scholarship, but some have been seen to offer 1-3 scholarships, totaling $1500 or so.
Now, some lawyers might wonder – why take on this additional cost?
Let’s do a cost analysis?
Putting a price on a college backlink is hard to quantify, but let’s assume that if you were going to “rent” a backlink from a .EDU website — it would cost you $65 per month. After 12 months, you’ve spent $780.00
In the case of the college scholarship, say you offer 1 scholarship, for $500. If only 1 university linked to you, the cost you’ve incurred (using the  rented link pricing model) would be approximately: $41.00 per month
-With just 1 link, you’re saving ~$24.00 per month
Imagine if you had 10, 15, 20, or 30 links coming to your scholarship page. All of these universities would link to your scholarship page ( as a service to their students ) but the benefit to you would be the links, – lots of them potentially.
If you get 10 universities to pick up your links, here’s an example financial breakdown.
Annual Budget of 10 University links ($65 per month, rented): $7800.00
Annual Budget of 10 University Links (through the scholarship you create): $500.00
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By creating 1 scholarship, you potentially saved yourself ten’s of thousands of dollars and were able to get backlinks that are unattainable to the mass market.
Innovative ideas like are what creates winners and losers. With a scholarship, you’re adding value to the life of a student — and indirectly, creating value for yourself through the acquisition of links and higher search engine rankings.
